Here Comes PHP 7; The Biggest Update In years

PHP enters its seventh edition and this one, is surely, one of the biggest updates to one of the most popular programming languages of the world. As per the statistics, PHP has been powering as many as 200 million websites across the globe, along with over 81.7 per cent public websites running PHP on the server side.

With the new upgrade, PHP has taken a giant leap. PHP 7 is the first major updated version of the programming language since 2004. PHP version 5.0 was released then. This new version of PHP programming language brings in some major improvements and is about three times up in terms of the performance as compared to PHP 5.6.

The new update also brings in some smaller, yet significant changes including the return type declarations, reduced memory usage, the spaceship operator, et al.

Some changes that make PHP 7 a path-breaking updating are magic quotes, removal of PHP safe mode, a number of new reserved keywords and others. With these changes, Web apps like WordPress will now be needed to be partially re-engineered to be PHP 7 ready. Although, in first instance, it appears to be fully compatible with the upgrade.